That Arizona Abortion Decision…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This story is straightforward and ethically simple. Apparently neither Republicans, nor Democrats, nor abortion activists, nor the President, not the news media is capable or willing to say so. I guess that leaves it up to me.

When the constantly legislating Supreme Court of the Sixties and Seventies illegally made up a Constitutional right that didn’t exist—the right to have an abortion limited only by the Supreme Court’s arbitrary limit based on that decade’s belief regarding “viability”,””— in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, it stole away the power to make laws regulating abortion in the states. This, in turn rendered unenforceable a law in Arizona dating from its days as a territory in 1864 (Arizona didn’t become a state until 1912) that almost completely banned abortion. The law was still valid in 1973; laws passed by the territorial government were all grandfathered into the state statute book, and nobody disputed that they had to be treated like any other law until such laws were amended or repealed.

When the Supreme Court correctly if ridiculously tardily declared Roe to be the bad law, bad theory and irresponsible power grab by SCOTUS that it was in the Dobbs decision overturning it, that Arizona law was, as Dr. Frankenstein would say, “Alive! It’s alive!” And so it was. The beginning of the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood et al v Kristin Mayes/Mayes Hazelrigg tells you pretty much all you need to know, though reading the whole opinion and its dissents in the 4-2 ruling is worth the time. The opinion begins,

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Rueful Observations on a Former O.J. Juror’s 2016 Admission

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

O.J. Simpson’s death this week brought back lots of bad memories—I can’t think of a good one—and a lot of familiar spin and dubious exclamations. One disturbing moment it brought back into the spotlight was the moment above, when in 2016, the ESPN series “O.J.: Made in America” showed Carrie Bess, one of the Simpson jurors, stating that her jury voted to acquit O.J. not because the jury didn’t think he was guilty, but because they sought “payback” for the police beating of Rodney King.

The whole exchange after the interviewer asks, “Do you think there are members of the jury that voted to acquit OJ because of Rodney King?”

Bess: Yes.
Interviewer: You do?
Bess: Yes.
Interviewer: How many of you do you think felt that way?
Bess: Oh, probably 90% of them.
Interviewer: 90 %! Did you feel that way?
Bess: Yes.
Interviewer: That was payback.
Bess: Uh-huh.
Interviewer: Do you think that’s right?

And the ex-juror shrugs.

Nice.

Observations:

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Ethics Quiz: The President’s Mexican Ventriloquist

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Over at Newsbusters, Jorge Bonilla argues that “the act of dubbing President Joe Biden in Spanish is tantamount to an act of election interference.”

He cites as evidence Biden’s interview this week about guns as aired on Univision and Unimás this week. Here is what the President said (so far, I haven’t found a YouTube video):

“The idea we don’t have background checks for anybody purchasing a weapon, the idea that we’re going to be in a position where he says that he famously told the NRA that don’t worry, no one’s going to touch your guns if I… From the very beginning, I used to teach the Second Amendment in law school, from the very beginning, there were limitations. You couldn’t own a cannon. You couldn’t… You could own a rifle or a gun.”

This is off the topic a bit, but did you know Donald Trump lies all the time? We require background checks for most gun purchases; the idea that “we don’t have background checks for anybody purchasing a weapon” is a false idea, and communicating it as if it isn’t is called “a lie.” Biden means that people making private purchases of firearms don’t currently have to get background checks. Then he again, as he has repeatedly for years, makes the absolutely untrue statement that “You couldn’t own a cannon.” No, Joe you could, and even lackey fact-checkers like the Post’s Glenn Kessler have called out this favorite piece of anti-Second Amendment fiction. Biden just keeps on repeating it, as interviewers nod their heads like those plastic German Shepherds in the back rear window of cars in the 80’s.

Back to Bonilla’s point: He says that listening to Biden’s weak and hesitant delivery should set off “Oh-oh…this guy is President?” alarms, but the President is protected from that legitimate realization when Spanish-language outlets dub his voice:

Those who watched the TelevisaUnivision interview of Joe Biden on Unimás (as I did, primarily) got English with subtitles. We heard the president in his own voice, speech pattern and mannerisms. We got to hear him trail off several times, and made assessments of his lucidity and cognition. Based on this feed we were able to speculate as to the efficacy of the (alleged) White House medical cocktail team…Those who watched the Spanish-dubbed interview on Univision were deprived of that perspective because of the stellar job done by the interpreter. When dubbed into Spanish, Biden sounds 40 years younger and without cognitive decline. The interpreter’s rich baritone, when transposed onto Biden, leaves viewers with the impression of a president far more vigorous than he actually is.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is dubbing Biden voice in Spanish for Spanish-speaking voters unethical “election interference”?

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WHAAAAT? NPR is Politically BIASED??? How Could That Be? [CORRECTED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh for heaven’s sake. National Public Radio’s cronies in Woke Journalism Land are stunned that Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published on Substack that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.” Seldom has the “Die Hard” clip above from the Ethics Alarms archive been more appropriate.

Here’s the Ethics Alarms NPR tag, which mostly catalogues the examples of NPR bias and unethical journalism Ethics Alarms has covered, and I’m sure it is still a drop in the metaphorical bucket. NPR was an Ethics Dunce recipient—again— just a few months ago.

NPR is extremely biased; its bias is flagrant and undeniable and has seeped into it programing on virtually every topic for decades. The only thing shocking about an NPR editor publicly admitting this is that anyone who was marinated in the organization’s dishonest and untrustworthy culture would be capable of telling the truth.

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‘Thank God It’s the Friday Open Forum!’ (TGITFO)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yikes. Once again, the Ethics Alarms attic is chaos, and I am waaaay behind in covering important ethics stories, breaking ethics stories and developments in recent ethics stories I did get around to. Yesterday, for example, we learned that LA Dodger two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani’s good friend and interpreter stole 16 million bucks from the player to cover his illegal gambling problem, not “just” four million.

I’m hoping the Wisdom of Crowds can help clear the metaphorical decks today.

So It Looks Like Harvard Students Aren’t Learning Logic, Ethics or History, But Damn If Those Kids Don’t Know How to Play the Race Card!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Harvard student pundit Maya Bodnick authored an indignant column in the Harvard Crimson arguing that “A Witch Hunt Is Targeting Black Harvard Faculty.” Bodnick, the niece of high-powered tech exec Sheryl Sandberg (not to suggest that her connection to a wealthy former CEO of Meta had any bearing on her admission, mind you), gives us this argument: because conservatives (like Christopher Rufo) have uncovered genuine plagiarism on the part of prominent black members of Harvard’s administration and faculty, including deposed Harvard president Claudine Gay, it is clear that the objective is to target black academics and scholars, and thus is racist.

To begin with, it would be nice if someone being educated at Harvard understood what “witch hunt” means. After all, it’s a historical reference, in fact, it’s a historical reference to an infamous event that occurred not all that far from Harvard. You see, there were never any witches, because they don’t exist. Various members of the Salem community in colonial days exploited the fear of witches to get innocent people tried, ruined, and executed. “Witch hunt” means a contrived and organized effort to falsely accuse and harm an innocent person for other, sinister motives. However, plagiarism, unlike witchcraft, is real, and the Harvard plagiarists the investigations have uncovered deserved the consequences of their dishonest scholarship. This last part is apparently beyond the ability of Bodnick to comprehend.

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Should We Avoid Saying Bad Things About O.J. Upon News of His Death?

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

No.

Maybe I should just end the post with that single word, because it’s essentially all we need to know from an ethics perspective.

O.J. Simpson, who just died of prostate cancer at 76, was a bad man, a sociopath, one of the most vivid examples of the narcissist celebrity who believes the basic rules that the “little people” are bound to follow don’t apply to him. I keep reading that O.J. was “controversial.” There’s nothing controversial about a man who slaughters his ex-wife and her male friend at the doorstep of the home he and his victim once shared, with his children sleeping upstairs. Such a man is a villain, and deserves to be executed.

I just watched an interview on Fox News with a journalist friend of Simpson’s who got all choked up talking about “the O.J he knew” and said that Simpson’s legacy was “complicated,” as if he was talking about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. “Well, yes, he did some bad things like locking up Japanese-American citizens and selling out Eastern Europe to a brutal dictator, but on the other hand, he did save the nation from economic and spiritual collapse and the world from Hitler…” What ethical relativistic garbage. Simpson was a great college and professional football player, that’s all. There have been a lot of them, and none of the others murdered two innocent human beings and got away with it. Having a fortunate physical ability and success in sports has very little to do with one’s value to society andthe human race, or the content of one’s character. If anything, Simpson was overly rewarded for being able to run fast and dodge tacklers. Moreover, stardom made him into a monster, if he wasn’t one already. Bill Cosby’s legacy can legitimately be called “complicated,” as he was a public figure who contributed significantly and positively to the culture even as he was drugging and raping hundreds of women who trusted him. Virtually everything O.J. did to our culture was, in the end, destructive.

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More Naming Ethics: Oakland’s Airport

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Among the eight posts on Ethics Alarms officially filed under “naming ethics” controversies there are four children (“Hades,” “Adolf,” a suicide in the family…), college buildings, helicopters, a mountain, and a law school. To that select group we now add an airport, and this case looks suspiciously like deliberate mischief if one is conspiratorially inclined.

I am not, of course.

Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland that “There is no there there,” and apparently the Port of Oakland Commission wants to embrace that description. It is preparing to rename the Oakland airport, currently “Oakland International Airport,” to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.” This would seem to intentionally encourage confusion with the better-known (and more heavily used) San Francisco International Airport, just across the bridge and 25 miles away. Before it started falling apart in chunks thanks to being nearly at Grand Zero in The Great Stupid, San Francisco was the glamorous, popular, golden girl on campus and poor Oakland was her fat, homely girlfriend.

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Houston, We Have an Idiot…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The post on Sheila Jackson Lee most recent outburst of ignorance demands this follow-up post. I wouldn’t pick on this silly woman over the same incident if she had just put a paper bag over her head and laid low as a normal person would do, but then why would I expect her to do anything appropriate, ever?

First, in the original post I didn’t focus on her audience, which was raided in the comments. I didn’t because what she said about the moon (it is mostly gas and emits “unique light and energy”) and the rest of her gibberish was equally damning in any context: it would have been inexcusable if she were talking to herself. Or a lamp post. However, giving some more though to this debacle, I realize that spouting false astronomical facts to students (of Booker T. Washington High School in Houston, named after a renowned black educator who must have been spinning in his grave) was infinitely worse than if she had been talking to adults, the majority of whom, I hope, would have known she was talking nonsense. She was there to educate young minds, and instead she handicapped them. Despicable.

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On the Dumbing Down of Scrabble

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was going to make this story an ethics quiz, but thought better of it. After all, there’s nothing unethical about Scrabble (now owned by Mattel) spinning off “Moron Scrabble.” Okay, the exciting Scrabble mutation is called “Scrabble Together.” Nonetheless, I find it hard to resist the feeling that this is a Great Stupid event.

The Mattel statements didn’t help. Ray Adler, vice-president and global head of games at Mattel, said: “Scrabble has truly stood the test of time as one of the most popular board games in history, and we want to ensure the game continues to be inclusive for all players.”

Oh-oh. Inclusive. Next we can expect “DEI Scrabble,” where minority players get twice as many points for their words as those privileged white, male players.

“For anyone who’s ever thought ‘word games aren’t for me'” Adler addled, “or felt a little intimidated by the classic game, Scrabble Together mode is an ideal option.” If someone is intimidated by Scrabble, she has more serious problems than new rules can solve.

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